New Wi-Fi Standard Doubles Connection Speeds

On Wednesday, the Wi-Fi Alliance, which sets the industry standards to ensure the compatibility of wireless equipment, approved a new standard, dubbed 802.11ac, which transmits data at 1.3 Gigabits per seconds, more than twice as fast as the existing 802.11n standard, CNN Money notes.

Of course, just because the standard allows data speeds up to 1.3 Gigabits per second, that doesn’t mean most consumers will be able to achieve those speeds in actual use. Very few Internet service providers offer even 1 Gigabit-per-second data speeds. However, with the Internet increasingly serving as a pipeline for mass media consumption, the new standard will help equipment manufacturers try and keep up with rising bandwidth usage.

Some ac-standard equipment started appearing last year. Now that the standard has been certified, sales are expected to accelerate, potentially boosting ac-certified equipment to a majority of the Wi-Fi equipment sales by next year.

Networking equipment makers like Netgear (NTGR[3]) and Cisco Systems (CSCO[4]) have already launched products built to the new standard.

In addition to faster data speeds, the ac standard will also permit more devices to simultaneously stream data from a single Wi-Fi source.